Climax Park in Akron has interesting origin

What a strange name. There just has to be a story behind it.

Climax Park is a quiet little playground with swings, a slide and a ballfield in the North Akron neighborhood known today as Chapel Hill.

It's about a mile north of Bettes Corners — the intersection of Tallmadge and Home avenues — named for Capt. Nathaniel Bettes, a Revolutionary War veteran who settled the land in 1810. The nearby CSX railroad tracks, curving gently around the bend, follow the former route of the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal, which operated from 1840 until the late 1860s.

Unless you live or work in the neighborhood, you might not even know that Climax Park exists. The 1-acre, city-owned site can be found where Independence Avenue dead-ends into DeValera Avenue, a street named for Irish statesman Eamon de Valera, who visited Akron in 1919.

The streets are an amalgamation of residential and commercial properties with ranch homes, Cape Cods and bungalows overlooking industrial warehouses.

Climax Avenue is east of the park, but the park didn't take its name from the street. Actually, it was the other way around. Climax Park was the name of a housing allotment that planners mapped out a century ago.

This is where the story gets a little steamy.

In 1919, the Taplin-Rice-Clerkin Co. purchased 42 acres along the Baltimore & Ohio and Pennsylvania railroads to build a new foundry and machine shop near Bettes Corners. The Akron business, a leading manufacturer of stoves, ranges and furnaces, acquired the extra land because it hoped to furnish homesteads for at least 200 employees.

James B. Taplin established the original foundry in 1861 with Alvin Rice and Hobart Ford. Taplin, Rice & Co. was based at 177 S. Broadway across from the Summit County Courthouse, a site occupied a century later by the Morley Health Center. William Clerkin Sr. bought the business and added his name to the letterhead.

Taplin stoves were iron monsters. They stood on four legs, weighed nearly 400 pounds and consumed coal. The Akron-made appliances were sold in every state and around the world.

The $200,000 North Akron plant opened in 1920 but vanished in a cloud of acrid smoke. An industrial fire ignited at 9 p.m. March 29, 1923, and destroyed the complex within 45 minutes. Thousands of curious onlookers gathered that night to watch the glowing inferno.

"Police kept crowds back from the threatening walls and protected the lives of hundreds who stood on the railroad tracks," the Beacon Journal reported. "As the flames died down, the twisted mass of red hot steel outlined the sky, and here and there flames shot from the interior of the plant where valuable machinery and patterns were being destroyed."

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The company vowed to rebuild and did so with great haste. Only six months later, officials dedicated Plant No. 2, a new foundry measuring 80 by 360 feet.

And now we get to the climax of the story.

The Taplin-Rice-Clerkin Co. manufactured Climax Stoves, Climax Ranges and Climax Furnaces. The Climax brand was internationally famous.

As the company advertised in verse:

"In the Climax, all the skill we combine

"What is best in the shop and the mine.

"What a wonderful heater, what an alround beater.

"Is it any wonder the world says that they’re fine!"

Yes, it's true: Climax Park is named for appliances.

For years, foundry workers labored in the stifling atmosphere, pouring molten metal into molds to create the company's products.

Business cooled off considerably during the Great Depression. The nearly 80-year-old company fell into debt and closed around 1938. The L. Albert & Son Co., a manufacturer of rubber mill machinery, acquired the old plant in 1941 and turned it into a warehouse.

In 1960, Akron builder Frank P. Lucco bought 7½ acres on DeValera Avenue, including the rectangular building, where he stored heavy equipment. Over the decades, the company added several warehouses along the street.

Real estate developer David Weinberger, president of the Danna Co., donated $500 to the city in 1961 to improve Climax Park and install playground equipment as he built family homes in the allotment.

For more than 60 years, it has served as a recreation area.

The swings, slide and ballfield were empty, though, on a recent sunny afternoon. The only sound was the drone of engines as two city workers mowed the grass.

In the distance, park visitors might notice a long, narrow building with a brick front painted turquoise green. That's the former foundry, 100 years old this year.

So now you know the origin of Climax Park. We hope the resolution of the mystery was to your satisfaction.

Mark J. Price can be reached at [email protected]

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